Tanaka Ryohei has been a quiet giant in Japanese print making for the past 50 years. His etchings span the gamut of scenes of rural Japan. They pay tribute to a graceful past which is happily still alive outside the big cities of Japan. This print depicts a beautiful leafy tree in the forefront and blrds in flight over a body of water...

This colorful print is an early Maki embossed print It is quite small It is a very low run only 30 copies were made Maki stared dong 50 copies by 1962 Earlier he may have lacked the confidence to do runs of that size – so he did 30 as shown here The 3 red suns are dramatic The print is signed in white ink an early Maki touch This is xx/30 the 3 suns shimmer 21 " x 9" the title is in kanji – a rare Maki style This is Signal -31 The paper is double thick – an early case in which ...

Tanaka Ryohei (b. 1933) is drawn to a wide range of subjects, particularly Japanese houses, shrines, temples, farmhouses, large, weathered trees, and winding lanes, but earlier in his career and occasionally in more recent years he has concentrated on a single piece of fruit or a roots, on segments of trees, tree branches and bark...

1971 was a big year for Haku Maki He did over 100 different images of Japanese prints. Some, like this one, were big prints this one is 30.5 Inches x 15.25 It is 68/108 this is the abstract kanji for Mu or Nothing and I entitled Nothing The kanji starts at the top then cascades down to the final four strokes at he bottom. From a distance it appears to me like the steps going from top to bottom of a building on a Chinese hill on the Yangzi...

in 1990 Haku Maki produced as many as 6 different images of famed Mt Fuji
Fuji-san here are 3 each print from a different block. lithographs
in the print at the right -- blue mountain -- the blue starts out dark at the bottom and becomes lighter up the print

In 1971 Haku Maki Japanese Master print-maker was at the height of his creative powers He had already done several “big” prints and turned his skills to producing a dramatic prints, This Big Blue was one. It depicts a war instrument, a halberd Makli created this design so that it showed how character was written. He showed us how the stroke order flowed on a woodblock print...

In the early 1980s Haku Maki produced this unusual print. It has a kanji bottom margin (Mountain and Water) and is only slightly embossed. It is as if he started to do a lithograph and then decided to emboss it a bit It is a modest size print and not spectacular. By the time he did this print Maki had finished with embossed kanji and ceramics and was heading toward less compelling work. The design here is interrupting the abstract part for Mountain is also OK...

Maki emanation series may well have been 100 different images. This is an early one, It shows a young man ready to grope a woman’s breasts. Who is the man and who is the woman? Adam and Eve?
Maki and his wife? Maki and another woman? 16" x 16"
Here I show images of the current emanation and single images of other Emanation series images.
In the last frame emanation 100

From 1969 to 1974 Haku Maki produced about 15 Big Red prints and some Big Blue and Green. This one Poem 71 52- was done in 1971. It depicts the kanji for Power. This striking image slices through the black background from top to bottom in a two-stroke movement. In the classic Maki mode the core image is set off by a black sun at the left and a small blue moon under it; on the other side there is a yellow splash...

Haku Maki produced this “pair” of prints in 1968. The first image is Child. This is the first time Maki produced an image with Child as a theme. Poem 68-52. The second one is his kanji for Water. Poem 68-53. This image was used again in the set of 21 prints he produced for Festive Wine, which was issued in 1969. The colors in both are strikingly beautiful in these images – as they also are as prints. Maki signed each in white ink, something he rarely did...